


Morphine, Camellias and Connecticut

by miss_madhatter



Category: Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: About death, Gen, M/M, Sad Ending, Suicide, TW:Suicide, but really sad idiots, im sorry, not smutty for those of you who were looking for/avoiding that yeah, sherlock and john are both idiots tbh, this fic actually made me cry while writing it, why sherlock why
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-09
Updated: 2014-11-09
Packaged: 2018-02-24 16:00:47
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,047
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2587412
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/miss_madhatter/pseuds/miss_madhatter
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He doesn’t have to look at Sherlock’s face to know the answer. That for once, this great man is stumped, left clueless. That something has gone against his calculations, something has gone awry, and that Sherlock doesn’t know the answer.</p><p>But John knows. You can’t explain humanity, you can’t calculate a living, breathing person, not even if you could map out their brain like the London Underground, there will always be the hidden tunnels that you know nothing about, where trains run by themselves hidden from your sight.</p><p>But knowing that doesn’t help. It doesn’t restore his faith in the infallibility of Sherlock’s genius, it doesn’t stop him from turning around and walking out the door. It doesn’t stop him from throwing off Sherlock’s hand when he tries to give chase. It doesn’t stop him from jumping into a taxi, leaving Sherlock standing on the pavement with his stupid pretentious coat flapping in the breeze.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Morphine, Camellias and Connecticut

**Author's Note:**

> I've had this fic sitting in the pipeline for a while, but I had no idea what to do with it...
> 
> I would say I hope I didn't make you sad but I actually hope I did sorry. 
> 
> This is actually my first fic for this fandom so I may have messed up some characters, I really hope not but if anything stands out please let me know! 
> 
> Come talk to me on tumblr! miss-madhatter.tumblr.com I'll be really happy to chat to you guys :)
> 
> EDIT: Minor changes, some issues with flow at the end that I just fixed up. Also in the beginning. And the middle...

 John has just started the night shift when the call comes in. A suicide, and probably the first of many tonight. As of late, there have been far too many. He wonders why he does this job every time he removes a body with its wrists slashed to the bone, every time he wipes the froth off the mouth of an overdose, every time he has to cut a noose and see bruises adorning the throat like shadows. But it’s his job, and the only one he would ever consider, so he grabs the keys from the bench and jumps into the drivers seat. Sherlock is already in the passenger seat, buckled up and ready to go. He turns the keys in the ignition and slams his hand down on the button for the sirens.

 

“We’ve got a suicide,” Sherlock tells him, “at Baker Street.”

 

John seems to shrink at the words. It can’t be - can it? “Wrists, drugs or hanging?” he asks.

 

“Drugs, probably. No apparent physical harm done to the body. The neighbor found her by the smell.”

 

At the use of the pronoun, ice washes through John’s stomach. The fact that the ambulance is swerving into the next lane seems unimportant next to his assumptions. But he is afraid to ask Sherlock, who seems as cold and aloof as ever. Surely, if it was her, even Sherlock would show some emotion? It’s hardly a reassuring thought, but he manages to regain control of the vehicle and races through a red light.

 

Shit. He doesn’t know the address. And now he’s going to have to ask.

 

“Sherlock,” he begins almost exasperatedly, “I need the address.”

 

There is no answer from the man next to him. “Sherlock? I-” He breaks off, cursing, as a car turns right in front of him. “Move, goddamnit. Sherlock, the address?”

 

“Really John, do use your intelligence. You know where to go,” Sherlock says. And he does. He’s known from the moment he picked up that phone, but he doesn’t want to believe it. His hands are shaking so badly that he can barely turn the wheel to enter Baker Street. It doesn’t help that next to him is Sherlock, composed as ever, who is now reaching across the gears to steady the wheel. The ambulance seems to park itself outside 221B, since John has already jumped out of the cab and is running up the stairs to their old flat, hoping against hope that it wont be-

 

But it is. And the shock of it drives him to his hands and knees at the feet of the body of Mrs Hudson, who is slumped in her favorite armchair like she could be sleeping. Only sleeping. Just sleeping. Any minute now, she will open her eyes with a start, and fuss over him and Sherlock, who he knows has come in behind him and is arguing with Anderson - when did Anderson get here? She’ll make a cup of tea and they’ll sit around the table - he’ll sit with Mrs Hudson and Sherlock will pace - and she’ll make her complaints about Sherlock’s tea getting cold and Sherlock will give some smart-ass reply and he’ll have to mediate as usual.

 

The wheelchair is parked next to the armchair. He moves over to it, knowing that its position is an indication that she wasn’t planning on getting back into it. She planned this. The body in the armchair is about 48 hours old. Was she planning it before he came? Was she already dead? He doesn’t know, and that is almost worse than knowing that she died painlessly, if the empty syringe labelled _Morphine_ lying next to her is any indication. There is a certain amount of pain involved in death, he decides, and the less pain the deceased suffers, the more pain remains for those left behind.

 

And God, it hurts. More than anything he’s ever felt. Even Harry’s passing didn’t hurt this much, he thinks vaguely. Sherlock and Anderson are still arguing behind him, but he doesn’t have the inclination to interfere. Let them squabble, bickering like kindergarteners while the body cools. He can almost feel the silent judgement from heaven. _You let this happen._

  

* * *

 

 

Much later, Lestrade is giving them the official account in his office - 48 hours, morphine overdose, no external injuries. No evidence of forced injection. No note. Will filed with the solicitor - she’s left them Baker Street. As if he could ever live there without being haunted by her ghost. Who knows, maybe that was her intention. A way to lay blame from beyond the grave, as it were.

 

The doctor who was supplying her morphine has been contacted, and appears to know nothing. Why did she have so much morphine on hand? Easier, of course, more convenient than bringing it around every day. Where was her nurse? Sherlock had paid a ridiculous amount for that nurse, not that he’d ever admit it. Nothing but the best for Mrs Hudson, and anything to keep her from a nursing home. _Mrs Hudson, leave Baker Street? England would fall!_ They said that about the ravens in the Tower as well, and clipped their wings to keep England standing. Maybe Mrs Hudson was a raven, too.

 

It seems that she sent the nurse away. Told her gently that she wouldn’t be needing her assistance for the day. Sherlock evidently didn’t pay the woman enough.

 

Right now, all John wants to do is find the nurse and grab her and shake her until she tells him why she left Mrs Hudson by herself. When Sherlock’s exact words had been _she is not to be left alone_.

 

Then again, if him and Sherlock hadn’t moved out, maybe she would never have been alone.

 

Suddenly, Lestrade’s office is a coffin. He can’t breathe, he can’t speak. He sways slightly on his feet, feeling Sherlock’s hand at his shoulder, steadying. His breath is coming in short pants, bile rising in his throat as he pictures her, resigned and alone, lifting a syringe in shaking fingers, why did she do it? Why? Why? WHY?

 

“Why, Sherlock?" he asks. "You’ve always got the answers, give me some answers now.” It's worse that he's trying to yell the words, but can't manage more than a broken whisper. 

 

He doesn’t have to look at Sherlock’s face to know the answer. That for once, this great man is stumped, left clueless. That something has gone against his calculations, something has gone awry, and that _Sherlock doesn’t know the answer._

But John knows. You can’t explain humanity, you can’t calculate a living, breathing person, not even if you could map out their brain like the London Underground, there would always be the hidden tunnels that you know nothing about, where trains run by themselves hidden from your sight.

 

But knowing that doesn’t help. It doesn’t restore his faith in the infallibility of Sherlock’s genius, it doesn’t stop him from turning around and walking out the door. It doesn’t stop him from throwing off Sherlock’s hand when he tries to give chase. It doesn’t stop him from jumping into a taxi, leaving Sherlock standing on the pavement with his stupid pretentious coat flapping in the breeze.

 

* * *

 

John does what he does best. He runs. He’s still numb as he grabs his belongings from their house. _I was never here, Sherlock_. He’s out before Sherlock makes a reappearance, to his simultaneous relief and annoyance. 

 

Plane tickets are easy to buy, John, he tells himself as he jumps back into the taxi. His phone has been ringing almost non-stop for the last hour, and it is now lying switched off at the bottom of his suitcase.

 

Is he overreacting?

 

No. No, he’s not. He needs to leave this place, he needs to get out and mourn Mrs Hudson. And every other friend he has ever lost, who he never had time to mourn before. That was what he was doing before Sherlock came along, wasn’t it? Mourning.

 

Then Sherlock made him forget that, made him believe that he could be normal again, happy. But it was all just a dream, wasn’t it?

 

He digs around in his suitcase, and as they pass over the Thames, he winds the window down as far as it will go and throws the phone into the river.

 

* * *

 

Every year, on the anniversary, John comes back to London. He ran from her funeral, so he at least owes her this much. Her grave is always clean, no moss or dirt obscuring the name, a polished jewel in a cemetery of broken glass.

 

Mrs Hudson loved camellias. He lays a wreath of them every year. He sits and talks to her, tells her about his job at the medical centre, about the little old ladies who come in and talk just like her. They’re never quite the same, he assures her. She is unique, if only just for the place she holds in his life. He tells her about his latest girlfriends, back in Connecticut, how his nightmares won’t go away, how a nurse called Mary Morstan has been dropping by the centre lately for no apparent reason.

 

Every year, he sees the silhouette of a man in a black trench coat standing amongst the graves. No matter that it’s pouring with rain, or hailing, or scorching hot, and he _knows_ that this man can’t stand the heat, he is always there. Year after year, without fail. 

 

John gets older. Funny, how that happens. It seems that one day he wakes up young and fresh, and the next day he is stooped, counting the white hairs in the mirror, shuffling around with a cane. He remembers a man who made him forget that he ever needed a cane.

 

He has to wheel his chair through the graves now. His soliloquies to Mrs Hudson are punctuated with the sounds of him coughing blood into a handkerchief.

 

One year, the wheel of his chair gets bogged down in the mud on a soggy day. He tries to wheel himself out, mud staining his fingernails, but the chair is well and truly stuck. Perhaps it is an hour that he sits there, perhaps it is only 5 minutes. He loses all sense of time, hunched over in a flimsy canvas chair. But a pair of slightly wrinkled, black sleeved hands appear at the wheels, freeing him, moving to the handles of his chair and wheeling him to the grave. His savior doesn’t speak, and John doesn’t turn around.

 

How do you break a silence that has lasted for centuries?

 

He’ll never find out, because the next month, he is lying in a hospital bed, desperately trying to communicate to the doctors what he needs. Sherlock. Get me Sherlock. Please. I need to see him.

 

But it's too little, too late. His death makes a small, 3cm by 3cm square in the newspaper. It is Molly who brings the square to Lestrade, both of them sitting in silence as they stare at it.

 

“He was a good man,” Lestrade says heavily. Molly just nods. Both old now, death is no longer a distant reality. They both come to a mutual consensus not to tell Sherlock.

 

But not telling Sherlock things has never been successful, and the next year it is Sherlock who lays a wreath of camellias at Mrs Hudson’s grave. And then Sherlock is gone too, and no-one lays wreaths at Mrs Hudson’s grave. Molly cleans it for a while, trying in vain to keep the polished jewel intact for a little longer, but then she too is too old to bend over.

 

Mrs Hudson’s grave slowly grows moss, dirt embedded in the crevices of the carved letters. A little camellia starts to sprout next to it, roots cracking the black marble. The gardener pulls it out, looking sadly at the jagged tears. A few more years, and the cemetery is razed over, replaced by a high rise shopping mall.

 

The world doesn’t stop spinning, no matter that everyone in it is dying. Perhaps John doesn’t mind the high rise shopping mall, as he watches it grow with whatever consciousness the dead have. Perhaps he knows that it is a symbol that everyone in this world is living, and that makes everything okay.

**Author's Note:**

> At least some of you thought that that was going to end happily right?


End file.
